National Newspaper Association joins copyright brief against OpenAI and Microsoft

The National Newspaper Association has joined a News/Media Alliance amicus brief urging a federal court in New York to reject OpenAI and Microsoft’s fair-use arguments in a consolidated copyright case brought by news publishers. The brief supports the publishers’ request for partial summary judgment and opposes the companies’ own summary-judgment motions.

The brief was filed Oct. 30 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the association joined it Nov. 1. It is signed by the News/Media Alliance, the National Newspaper Association, the National Press Photographers Association and ProPublica.

The filing concerns multidistrict litigation in which more than a dozen publishers have sued OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged use of news content without permission to train AI systems and to power real-time answers through retrieval-augmented generation. The cases were transferred for coordinated pretrial proceedings in April 2025 and are before Judge Sidney H. Stein.

The organizations argue that copying articles for both training and retrieval-augmented generation is not transformative fair use when the resulting products substitute for the original reporting. The brief treats retrieval as distinct from training: a system searches for and copies relevant online material to answer a user’s request. It says AI answers may be summaries or verbatim reproductions that reduce readers’ need to visit the source publication.

Publishers rely on website audiences to earn revenue from advertising, subscriptions, premium access, affiliate arrangements and donations, while licensing is an emerging additional market, the brief says. The News/Media Alliance said ChatGPT sends publishers 96% less referral traffic than traditional Google search, which it argues cuts advertising and subscription revenue and demonstrates direct competition for readers.

The National Newspaper Association represents community newspapers in every state. Its typical member is a nondaily paper with circulation of 3,000 to 5,000, with staff based in the communities they serve. The 141-year-old, Florida-based nonprofit said local journalism should not be used for training, remarketing or any other purpose without permission.

Jeremy Gulban, the association’s chair and chief executive of CherryRoad Media, said federal courts must build a “firewall” between AI programs and local news organizations. He warned that accepting a fair-use or other defense would first damage local reporting, threatening reporters’ and editors’ jobs and coverage of city government, civic affairs, youth sports, churches and nonprofit groups.

Danielle Coffey, the president and chief executive of the News/Media Alliance, which represents more than 2,200 U.S. publishers, said the litigation is existential for the industry. She said a weakening of copyright law could deprive millions of Americans of news about their communities and country.

The case forms part of a wider unresolved legal debate over generative-AI training. The U.S. Copyright Office said its report had identified dozens of pending U.S. lawsuits involving fair use, alongside a policy tension between licensing rules that may constrain AI development and unlicensed uses that may harm creators by generating competing content from their work.